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Chinese authorities have been on an extended hunt for so-called “Black public relations” companies that have made fortunes cleaning up the Internet images of individuals and institutions.

The operations, also known as “Internet scrubbing companies,” charge heavily for surfing the web and arranging for the deletion of any unflattering references to corporations, government departments or officials.

But the Black PR companies’ key to cleaning up their clients’ online image is bribing people with access to the delete buttons at China’s portals such as the country’s largest search engine, Baidu.

With campaigns against corruption apparently at the top of the agenda for China’s incoming president and head of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, the activities of the Black PR companies have been the target of a national campaign that has closed down several thousand of these operations and led to the arrest of several hundred people.

Last week in a lengthy article the well-regarded online financial and economics magazine Caixin reported that the first and perhaps most successful of the Black PR companies, Beijing-based Yage Time Advertising was closed down last July.

Not only was Yage the first, it also appears to be the last operating of the Black PR companies, said Caixin.

The magazine said a raid on the company’s offices in which more than 100 employees were detained stemmed from the campaign launched jointly by four government agencies: the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.

But even though the campaign represents a small victory in the Beijing government’s ill-starred fight against endemic corruption the Caixin story did not find favour with the army of censors who man the Great Firewall of China.

The story was quickly removed from the Caixin website, though a copy of the Chinese version had already been downloaded by the New York Times and an English translation is now circulating.

The possibilities of an Internet scrubbing business were first seen, according to the Caixin story, by the founder of Yage, Gu Dengda, 30, who is now awaiting trial on bribery charges along with about a dozen image cleanup specialists.

He was working at a lowly job at the Internet portal Baidu in the early 2000s when he figured there must be money-making potential in the fact that more than two million messages were being posted on the site’s public forums every day. In addition, readers were posting a massive number of comments on news and information websites.

At that time information could be easily deleted from the Baidu site based on a single complaint.

Gu would contact image-conscious companies or individuals and offer to delete negative information about them, at first charging only the equivalent of between $150 and $1,500.

He would then contact the web technicians with the complaint and the offending item would be swiftly removed.

The scam was so successful that in 2007 Gu left Baidu and set up what became Yage Time Advertising.

Caixin quoted former employees as saying Gu told them that companies that wanted to get listed on the stock exchange, but which had bad reputations, were excellent candidates for Black PR assistance. So, he is reported to have said, are local government officials and entertainment stars.

Yage’s services were also used by foreign companies such as Pizza Hut and the Japanese restaurant chain Yoshinoya.

But Yage’s best clients, accounting for about 60 per cent of the nearly $8 million revenue the company made each year, was local government second- and third-tier employees pushing for promotion, including many police officers.

The company’s most profitable time of year was March, when the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the China People’s Political Consultative Conference are held in Beijing.

It is common for complaints against local officials to be raised at these meetings and reputations and hopes of advancement can be ruined.

Gu apparently told one internal meeting that nervous local government officials could be persuaded to pay the equivalent of $75,000 or more to ensure the Internet was cleansed of all bad information about them.

One Shenzhen private equity firm was said by Yage employees to have paid more than $150,000 to have all negative publicity erased from the web.

An essential skill for Gu was the ability to hunt out and build good relations with administrators at the various search engine companies. And, of course, he paid them for every unflattering item deleted.

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